GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ – EN INDIA / IN INDIA

rollason

4 years ago

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GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: EN INDIA / IN INDIA

In the wake of the recent sad decease on 17 April this year of Colombia’s Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel García Márquez, an aspect of his work which may have been unjustly overlooked is his impressive and remarkable influence in India.

This is highlighted in an article by Kavita Punjabi, ‘Salaams Gabo’, in The Times of India, 20 April 2014:

The author sees ‘Gabo’ as ‘a supreme architect’ who ‘through his tales he enabled the people of the North to see the South – us – as we see ourselves’, who worked to undo ‘the loss of cultural memory under colonialism’ and ‘drew us [Indians] close, very close, to Latin America’. She also states: ‘Three of the thirty languages that One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into are Indian. The Malayalam version is into the 13th edition, having sold over 25,000 copies; the Bangla and Hindi translations are also bestsellers’, and adds for our times that ‘never before, in the history of Facebook, have so many Indians grieved the passing away of a writer’.

With this, the story of Gabo’s footprint in India should surely now be wide open for research!